The Biology Of King Kong

In the world of movie monsters, no creature stands as tall as King Kong. Sure, at just 25 feet in height, this gorilla may not be the biggest beast in the jungle. But more than 70 years after his classic film debut, Kong has reached a legendary status that few other film characters can even hope to attain.

And this great ape's fame is set to get even bigger following director Peter Jackson's remake of the movie, which opens on Wednesday, Dec. 14. The special-effects extravaganza presents one of the most realistic movie monsters ever seen, making Kong seem nearly as vital and real as the human actors with whom he shares the screen.

Of course, we all know that no matter how realistic he looks on the screen, Kong is just a fantasy. But what if he wasn't? Could a giant gorilla like Kong really exist?

"I remember my high school physics teacher telling me that Kong was a physical impossibility. This is basically correct, I think," says John Hutchinson, a researcher at the University of London's Royal Veterinary College, who studies how very large animals stand and move.

In the movie, Kong appears to be about 25 feet tall in a crouch--about seven times the height of an actual silverback gorilla. At that size, a very rough estimate tells us Kong would weigh anywhere from 20 to 60 tons.

That would make it quite difficult for him to get around. "Given that Kong would be supporting his mass on two legs, I strongly doubt he'd be athletic at all. He might even have a hard time moving faster than a slow shuffle," says Hutchinson. "In a worst case scenario, which is still quite likely, he couldn't even stand. Kong's appearance is basically that of a gorilla writ large; this is not what we'd expect from a giant gorilla. His dimensions, especially the robustness of his legs, should be much more extreme than a big male gorilla's."

Kong's massive bones might be strong enough to support his weight, but he likely wouldn't have enough muscle mass to move around. If he tried to run, jump or tackle something, there's a good chance he'd simply crumple.

The good news is that as long as he didn't move around much, Kong could probably survive just fine. Giraffes are almost as tall and are more than able to keep their bodies running. They have elastic blood vessels and special valves in their neck arteries, which help pump blood the long distance from their heart to their head. If equipped with these anatomical specializations, Kong would have a big heart and high blood pressure (probably about 2.5 times that of a human), but he'd be relatively healthy.

Of course, keeping a big body like that powered would require huge amounts of food. Since Kong is a mammal, his dietary requirements would be quite demanding. Larger animals tend to have lower metabolic rates, but it's reasonable to expect that Kong would consume truckloads of food every day. Since an average adult male gorilla eats approximately 50 pounds of food daily--about one-eighth of its body weight--we can guess that Kong would need at least 7,500 pounds of food per day. To put that in human terms, that's about 6,000 heads of lettuce, 15,000 Big Macs or 65,000 Pop-Tarts.

In the real world, different populations of gorillas have widely varied diets but tend to gravitate toward leaves, fruits and other parts of hundreds of plant species. Gorillas are also known to eat grubs, termites and ants, but they stay away from meat. It's possible that since Kong is such a unusual specimen, he'd adapt his diet to snack on some of the many critters that live near his home on Skull Island. But since the island is also home to giant, mutant plants, we can speculate he eats pretty much the same stuff as a regular gorilla--just a whole lot more of it.

Once he's relaxing under a tree and has finished one of his gigantic meals, there will probably be only one thing left on Kong's mind: sex. In the movie, Kong falls in love with Anne Darrow, a human actress. That relationship is never consummated--for obvious reasons. But a love connection between man and beast isn't out of the question.

"What I would interpret as cross-species sexual attraction does happen," says Barbara J. King, a biological anthropologist and professor at The College of William and Mary. She studies the social communication of great apes and once had the chance to introduce her college dean to one of the animals in her lab. "The female of the gorilla group was very attracted to him, she pursed her lips and pushed small gifts through the cage at him," she says. "She clearly knew that he was the only male in the group, and she fixated on him."

So Kong might go ape for the pretty young ingénue. But Kong's not just a lover--he's also a fighter. In the movie, he beats off a Tyrannosaurus Rex that tries to snack on Darrow. King says that's completely in line with gorilla behavior. "Silverbacks, like Kong, are so protective," she says. "They're willing to lay their life on the line."

The gorilla's final freakout is also perfectly believable. Brought to New York and put on display by human captors, Kong eventually breaks loose and goes on a rampage through the city. Gorillas are ordinarily quite gentle and will go out of their way to scare off a threat, rather than actually fight. But King thinks that an ape in the city would likely lose its temper. "I think he [Kong] probably would completely freak out and become aggressive," she says. "Any animal would go on the offensive and try to escape."

This might all seem like a silly discussion--it's just a movie, right? But we can learn something from fictional beasts. "The original Kong helped me want to become a person who uses biomechanics to study large animals, including extinct ones," says the Royal Veterinary College's Hutchinson. "Of course, this is entertainment, not science. But it's fun to speculate scientifically about how such big animals would work in the real world."

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